This is not your everyday Masonic Jewel... you
must read the following text to understand the full significance of this Masonic
story! In the study of the sciences, in teaching them to his children and his
contemporaries, and in instituting the rites of initiation, Enoch is supposed to have
passed the years of his peaceful, his pious, and his useful life, until the crimes of
mankind had increased to such a height that, in the expressive words of Holy Writ,
"every imagination of the thoughts of man's heart was only evil continually."
It was then, according to a Masonic tradition, that Enoch, disgusted with the
wickedness that surrounded him, and appalled at the thought of its inevitable
consequences, fled to the solitude and secrecy of Mount Moriah, and devoted himself to
prayer and pious contemplation. It was on that spot--then first consecrated by this
patriarchal hermitage, and afterward to be made still more holy by the sacrifices of
Abraham, of David, and of Solomon--that we are informed that the Shekinah, or sacred
presence, appeared to him, and gave him those instructions which were to preserve the
wisdom of the antediluvians to their posterity when the world, with the exception of but
one family, should have been destroyed by the forthcoming flood. The circumstances
which occurred at that time are recorded in a tradition which forms what has been called
the great Masonic Legend of Enoch, and which runs to this effect:

Enoch, being inspired by the Most High, and in
commemoration of a wonderful vision, built a temple underground, and dedicated it to
God. His son, Methuselah, constructed the building; although he was not acquainted
with his father's motives for the erection. This temple consisted of nine brick
vaults, situated perpendicularly beneath each other and communication by apertures left in
the arch of each vault. Enoch then caused a triangular plate of gold to be made,
each side of which was a cubit long; he enriched it with the most precious stones, and
encrusted the plate upon a stone of agate of the same form. On the face he engraved,
in ineffable characters, the true name of Deity, and placing it on a cubical pedistal of
white marble, he deposited the whole within the deepest arch.

When this subterranean building was completed,
he made a door of stone, and attaching to it a ring of iron (which looked like the jewel
above), by which it might be occasionally raised, he placed it over the opening of the
uppermost arch, and so covered it over that the aperture could not be discovered.
Enoch himself was permitted to enter it but once a year; and on the death of Enoch,
Methuselah, and Lamech, and the destruction of the world by the deluge, all knowledge of
this temple, and of the sacred treasure which it contained, was lost until, in after
times, it was accidentally discovered by another worthy of Freemasonry, who, like Enoch,
was engaged in the erection of a temple on the same spot.

The legend goes on to inform us that after Enoch
had completed the subterranean temple, fearing that the principles of those arts and
sciences which he had cultivated with so much assiduity would be lost, in that general
destruction of which he had received a prophetic vision, he erected two pillars--the one
of marble, to withstand the influence of fire, and the other of brass, to resist the
action of water. On the pillar of brass he engraved the history of creation, the
principles of the arts and sciences, and the doctrines of Speculative Masonry as they were
practiced in his times; and on the one of marble he inscribed characters in hieroglyphics,
importing that near the spot where they stood a precious treasure was deposited in a
subterranean vault.